Traditional POS transactions where a customer purchases goods from a merchant in the merchant's store are often inefficient and do not track all the products. Traditional point of sale programs may not focus on what products were tried on and liked but not purchased which gives insight into what the consumers/users wish to buy and how they wish to buy it. For example, for expensive items, customers may often desire to make several trips to a store before making a purchase. Or items may be related such that the customer may desire to purchase one item of a series now and other related items at a later date. Unfortunately the items the client looked at and were interested in but not purchased are not recorded inside a store system. Often times the clients lose the current paper sales tools containing the product names and info. This inefficiency causes lost sales and confusion for the sales person and client because they only keep a record of what was sold for replenishment and never record the items not sold.
Current consumer shopping trends and transactions have become more complex than the traditional customer-merchant POS model can handle. In some industries, there are also agents/vendors or other intermediaries that sell certain goods at the merchant's location. For example, makeup artists often work direct for cosmetic companies selling their particular brands of makeup in department stores, and boutique stores as freelancers. Often, these makeup artists are not employees of the store but are independent freelancers/sales people that sell one or more product lines from various manufacturers and don't keep records of sold items because they don't ring their sales. Normally these freelancers/salespeople give all charts and information on products to the client which is often lost or misplaced. In some industries, manufacturers may also sell goods directly, usually (although not exclusively) online.
Thus today's shopping experience involves multiple transactions that are possible between (or among) a customer, merchant, agent, manufacturer, or other various parties. To the extent that there are systems or programs for overseeing and monitoring such multiple transactions, the systems or programs that are based on traditional POS techniques are inefficient, outdated and do not keep track of what products are tried on and not sold. Often, the systems or programs are paper based or use simple databases that do not allow for the necessary tracking and follow up which make more complex transactions difficult for the merchants, agents, manufacturers and customers.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method and apparatus for a sales system that produces, saves, and analyzes data efficiently to allow for the tracking and follow up of products for customers/users that desire to purchase or use multiple products from multiple parties at multiple times. There is also a need for an improved digital User Interface using our picture/template/transform/video with link technology. This digital User Interface uses a step by step sequence list for each area of the face/body which lists and explains the products used for each step. There are attached product links which are automatically generated for each entered product. These links can be selected in each step to purchase the products electronically at a later date after the point of sale.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.
The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.